The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) is pleased to announce the immediate rollout of its annual #UmntanaEskolweni #NgwanaSkolong Campaign as schools prepare to reopen for the 2026 academic year. This campaign is a direct intervention to defend the constitutional right of every child to education and to confront the persistent exclusion, neglect, and humiliation of working-class and poor learners within the basic education system.
As the school year begins on the 15th of January 2026, thousands of learners continue to face barriers to access, including being turned away due to unpaid school fees, lack of uniforms, shortage of stationery, non-issuance of school reports, and failing or unsafe school infrastructure. These realities reflect a state that has normalised inequality in education and allowed poverty to determine a child’s future.
The #UmntanaEskolweni #NgwanaSkolong Campaign is aimed at recovering the dignity, access, and safety of learners, and ensuring that no child is excluded from schooling on the basis of class, income, or social background. Through this campaign, the EFF will actively intervene to ensure that learners are admitted, registered, and allowed to attend school without discrimination or financial coercion.
The campaign will focus on ensuring that no learner is turned away from school due to unpaid fees, lack of uniform, or stationery; ensuring that all learners receive their school reports, regardless of financial status; and conducting oversight visits to schools to assess readiness for the academic year, including classroom conditions, availability of textbooks, and delivery of learning materials.
Additionally, the campaign also ensures the presence of safe, working, and flushing sanitation facilities, and the total rejection of pit toilets; while working with teachers to identify learners in need of support with uniforms, particularly shoes, and basic learning necessities, and coordinating interventions to supply these and restore dignity.
The EFF directs that all its structures and public representatives — from the Central Command Team, Provincial and Sub-Regional Command Teams, Branch Command Teams, Members of Parliament, Provincial Legislatures, and Municipal Councils — must actively participate in the campaign without fail.
Every EFF leader and public representative is expected to adopt schools, engage directly with school management and educators, and submit written reports on the state of school readiness, incidents of exclusion or discrimination against learners, infrastructure failures, shortages of learning materials, and interventions undertaken to assist learners.
These reports must be submitted through organisational structures and will form part of the EFF’s broader oversight and accountability programme in the education sector. The EFF emphasises that children must never be humiliated or exposed in the process of assistance. Any intervention must be carried out with discipline, respect, and revolutionary care, as there is no need to parade poverty or desperation.
The Basic Education Department is one of the critical Ministries which have been sacrificed to the neo-liberal establishment as part of political bargaining by the former liberation movement. It is therefore important to exercise maximum oversight over the sector to ensure that the poorest of the poor are not left behind, while the ANC-DA grand coalition focuses on servicing privileged sectors of schooling.
The #UmntanaEskolweni #NgwanaSkolong Campaign is the EFF’s practical response to this failure as no child must be left behind or turned away from learning. The EFF wishes all learners ad successful and fulfilling educational experience for 2026.
The EFF has a youth wing called the EFF Youth Command.
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